I’ve been using Notepad++ since high-school. I’ve been using it so much that I don’t even install Adobe Dreamweaver with my Creative Suite installs anymore. I know there are free IDEs like Aptana Studio and Eclipse, but if you want a barebones text editor that you can customize how you want, Notepad++ is the ideal solution (at least for Windows). I recently discovered some custom plugins that just blew my mind how much time I was wasting. Plugins that make me way more productive. These can all be found on the Notepad++ Plugins page.

After watching some PHP tutorials, I noticed that the presenter had a lot of custom functions/macros for tedious work. Things like creating a barebones HTML page with the <html><head></head> etc. written for you so you don’t have to do it all from scratch everytime. After looking around for a similar function for Notepad++, I found WebEdit (I couldn’t get QuickText to work at all). It allows you to make your own commands in a INI file so that you can use shortcuts in your code. For example. I have “a” (after pressing alt-enter) to write out <a href=”#”>|</a>. You can even use the pipe character to tell it where the caret will be after writing. This is something that everyone should use if you’re a web developer using Notepad++.

Solarized isn’t a plugin, it’s a visual theme. It’s designed to increase legibility, and reduce eye strain. Perfect from programmers who code all day or work at night. You can find the Notepad++ version GitHub.

I don’t know anything that directly relates with explorer, but you could use NppFTP that comes with Notepad++. It at least gives you an Explorer-like view for your FTP folders, and lets you upload back to your server directly within Notepad++. I personally just use Filezilla and do it manually.

Hi. RefreshBrowser is a plug-in which will refresh the web browser automatically when you save a document in notepad++. On a big monitor with NPP and the browser open side by side, it’s like working in an IDE.